Synopsys, Zuken tie simulation to boards

Promising an integrated platform for system-level electronic design, simulation, and verification, Synopsys Inc. and Zuken have announced a partnership to link Synopsys' Saber mixed-signal simulator to Zuken's CR-5000 pc-board design environment. A bidirectional interface will let users run Saber from within Zuken's schematic capture environment.

Saber is broadly used in the automotive and aerospace industries as a multi-domain simulator. It can handle electrical, mechanical, magnetic, hydraulic, and thermal domains. It provides time and frequency domain analysis, model libraries, multi-language modeling tools, and waveform analysis.

Zuken's CR-5000 is a constraint-driven pc-board design and layout environment. CR-5000 System Designer is the schematic capture portion of the tool suite. Earlier this month, Zuken announced a partnership with Aldec that will make it possible to launch Aldec's FPGA design tools from within Zuken's CR-5000 System Designer.

Until now, said Mark Williams, director of the Saber product line at Synopsys, there was only a one-way, netlist-driven interface between Saber and CR-5000. "A fairly significant number of mutual customers were pushing for a better interface," he said. One such customer that's been announced is automotive firm Bosch.

The new interface, Williams said, will provide full control of the Saber simulator through the CR-5000 System Designer user interface. For results analysis, CR-5000 users will be able to select which nets to look at during plots, even though the actual plotting is still done by Saber. Users will be able to cross-probe on the schematic to select nets. "It's a very fluid interface between the actual design environment and the simulation control and results analysis," he said.

"Engineers in our customer base have expressed a wish to try a more closely integrated design engineering environment," said Nik Kontik, technology partner at Zuken. "This is a much more integrated environment for the front end designer."

The integration uses Synopsys' Frameway technology, a standardized API used to link Saber with third-party environments. Williams said that Synopsys and Zuken expect it will be completed near the end of 2007. Meanwhile, the companies will demonstrate the capability at next week's Design Automation Conference.